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The Untranslatability in Chinese-English Translation of Film Subtitles Under the Perspective of Cultural Limitation—A Case Study of Empresses in the Palace

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The Untranslatability in Chinese-English Translation of Film Subtitles Under the Perspective of Cultural Limitation—A Case Study of Empresses in the Palace 2016 International Conference on Education, Training and Management Innovation (ETMI 2016) ISBN: 978-1-60595-395-3 The Untranslatability in Chinese-English Translation of Film Subtitles under the Perspective of Cultural Limitation—A Case Study of Empresses in the Palace * Xiang-min LI and Meng-jie ZHAO Beijing International Studies University, China *Corresponding author Keywords: Untranslatability, Cultural limitation, Subtitles, Translation strategy. Abstract. Promoting national TV dramas to the overseas markets becomes a new means to spread Chinese five-thousand-year culture and history, and broadcasting costume TV dramas in foreign countries in particular. Therefore, the importance of the precise and appropriate subtitle translation cannot be overemphasized. This thesis, from the cultural limitation perspective, takes the US version of Zhen Huan Zhuan, also called Empresses in the Palace, as an example and its lines as corpus to analyze the Chinese-English subtitles translations and expects to interpret the cultural untranslatability caused by cultural limitation. Introduction With the economic and cultural communication getting closer with foreign countries, more and more TV dramas such as Empresses in the Palace entered the international cultural market. However, due to the different historical backgrounds, social conditions, local customs, religions, language structures and thinking patterns, the cultural differences are resulted. To some extent, it is the cultural limitation that leads to the untranslatability and forms a barrier of the communication between different people with different cultures. Thus, the accuracy and high quality of subtitles as key tools to output our Chinese culture are highly required. To adapt to American audiences appreciate habits, US version Empresses in the Palace had a proper deletion of the original plot to make the story more compact, but it still retains the original Chinese characteristics, accompanied by English subtitles. After its release being unpopular in America, it's official English subtitles translation caused a lot of disputes and controversies at home and abroad. In recent years, Culture Turn theory has arrested the attention of many translators, which is mainly used to aim at cultural shocks in translation and solve the untranslatable problem. Therefore, this thesis will combine the untranslatability of culture, culture turn theory and characteristics of subtitle translation together, and take some specific examples from Empresses in the Palace to analyze its Chinese-English subtitle translations strategies. Culture Turn Theory and the Cultural Untranslatability Sussan Bassnett and André Lefevere in 1990 firstly and formally put forward "Culture Turn", which marked a shift of emphasis from linguistic elements to cultural elements and placed translation activity into concrete cultural context and brought intercultural communication and sociology into translation. Meanwhile, in recent decades, it also has arrested the attention of many translators in China. Xu Yuanchong declares that translation is a re-creation. Liu Miqing established the theoretical framework of cultranslation in his book An Outlined Theory of Cultranslation which symbolized that the theoretical system of cultranslation came into being. As Nida (2001: 82) pointed out, "For truly successful translating, biculturalism is even more important than bilingualism, since words only have meanings in terms of the cultures in which they function"[1]. Jin (2003) suggests that every language has so-called culturally-loaded terms, which are 255 the symbolic representation of the value system, history, religion, customs, thinking patterns and life styles of that peculiar culture. Jin also points out not all culturally-loaded words have completely equivalent words to express the same meaning owing to the difference on culture[2]. Thus there is no valid way to realize one-to-one translation. They are mainly represented as follows: "the lack of expression, the different semantic association, and the different pragmatic meaning, which is the so-called "cultural untranslatability" (Yuan, 2010: 110)[3]. The social distance between Chinese culture and English culture is quite far away, which results in a huge difficulty in C-E and E-C translation (Li, 2010) [4]. Characteristics of Subtitles Translation Subtitles is a kind of "constraint translation", regarding its limitations in time and space. It can only "consist of one or two lines of an average maximum length of 35 characters" (Gottlieb, 1998)[5]. Since people generally speak much faster than they read, subtitling inevitably involves textual constraints such as the need to reduce the original message as well as the technical constraints of shortage of screen space and lack of time. The subtitler endeavors to retain as much as possible of the original but has the usual translation problems of transfer between two languages and cultures compounded by the specific constraints. These constraints will affect the quality of subtitle translation. In a sum, limited time, limited Space and cultural difference are three main characteristics of subtitle translation. Film subtitle often appears on the screen in a flash, the average time is between one and two seconds, so it is better to use short and familiar words, and the sentence should be simple and clear. The key point of subtitling translation is to be concise and appropriate. For the reason of cultural differences, the translator must take a full consideration to the environment of target language in the problem of cultural differences. The Untranslatability of Culture in Empresses in the Palace The interlocking, coherent and exciting plot and gorgeously graceful and beautiful vision of Empresses in the Palace attract numbers of audiences. Meaningful poetic drama lines and mixed literary and simple Chinese sentences increase the connotation and charm of this TV drama. Meanwhile it also reflects Chinese traditional costume, architecture, landscape, recreation, food, medicine, vessel, official, regulation system, title, customs, philosophy, poetry, verse, drama, music, painting, historical figures, etc., showing and representing well the profound beauty of Chinese tradition culture. In the process of external communication of this classic costume drama, although the 76 original drama set has been compressed into 6 episodes, which led to some cultural discount, it still contains thick Chinese culture no matter in background or in content. Therefore, the untranslatability could be seen everywhere in this whole work. The Untranslatability Caused by the Vacancy of Cultural Loaded Words "Empresses in the Palace" tells the story of love and hatred and power seizing and disputing at court during the Yong Zheng years of the Qing Dynasty in ancient China. Large amounts of court vocabularies are applied into this drama such as cultural loaded words of traditional Chinese medicine, perfume, spices and classical music. Among them, the court words are typical especially. The title of those imperial concubines, appellation, palace decoration, jewelry, food, etc. are totally vacant in English and American culture, which lead to untranslatability. For instance, the identity change of Zhen Huan from "Chang zai, Gui ren, Pin, Fei and Gui fei" does not exist in the English medieval royal palace. In addition, in this play, the emperor declares himself as "Zhen", brothers of the emperor (Wang ye) declares themselves as "Ben wang", and officials claims themselves "Ben guan". Harem and concubines who are in "Fei" or above this level could call themselves as "Ben gong", to people who are in higher position like emperor and empress they call themselves as "Chen qie", and servants and maids call them "Niang niang". Concubines in "Pin" level 256 could call themselves as "Ben pin", to higher people call themselves as "Pin qie", and servants and maids call them "Xiao zhu". Concubines in lower level than "Pin" call themselves as "Wo", to higher ones call themselves as "Qie shen", and servants and maids call them "Xiao zhu". In English, people usually address noble woman as "My Lady" or "Madam". If the person is a member of the royal family, people usually use "Your Highness". Those complex titles are completely vacant in the western culture, so that we cannot find equivalent words in English. In the drama, when imperial doctor intends to give a jade to Zhen Huan to show his love, he says, "Yi pian bing xin zai yu hu". The translation of it in Empresses in the Palace is "A jade vessel is the symbol of a pure heart." In Chinese, "Yu hu" means true, pure and faithful love. However, in English culture, jade does not refers to that. Moreover, since western countries have different historical and cultural backgrounds from the ancient China, ways of greeting are also significantly different. For example, we can often hear "Huang shang wan fu jin an" in the drama. If we translate it literally like "Hope you 10000 luck and safety with gold", foreign audiences will feel confused. They may wonder what it matters with ten thousand and gold. The Untranslatability Caused by the Language Structure Differences The language used in Empresses in the Palace has its own style such as meaningful poetic drama lines and mixed literary and simple Chinese sentences. Some dialects using, poem re-writing and directly citing are also applied into this drama. However, due to the unique characteristics of each language, these two languages cannot be converted easily sometimes in voice,
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